Gianpietro Dotti

Area of Interest

Dr. Dotti studied immunotherapy strategies to treat patients with hematologic malignancies including lymphomas and leukemia and solid tumors such as neuroblastoma. In particular, he developed the program of the CD19-specific chimeric antigen receptor at Baylor College of Medicine and cloned a novel chimeric antigen receptor targeting the light chain of human immunoglobulins. This chimeric molecule engrafted in human T-lymphocytes allows a selective elimination of tumor cells expressing the kappa-light chain of human immunoglobulin whilesparing the normal compartment of B-lymphocytes expressing the lambda-light chain. Dr Dotti was also involved in developing CAR-based strategies to target solid tumors such as neuroblastoma in pediatric patients and triple negative breast cancer in adult patients. In collaboration with Dr Brenner he also developed the clinical phase of a novel safety switch for T cells based on the human caspase-9. A significant focus of Dr Dotti research is the development of strategies of T cell engineering aimed at overcoming immune suppressive mechanisms of the tumor microenvironment.